04/29/2008

SOA Hot Topics Roundtable Podcast: Public Sector SOA

The final podcast from the Public Sector SOA day at our March meeting, is now available. This Public Sector SOA Hot Topics Roundtable podcast features Victor Harrison from CSC, Bill Vass from Sun Microsystems Federal, and Kshemendra Paul of the Office of Management & Budget. Keeping with our hottopicroundtable format, our objective was to generate a meaningful conversation between thought leaders and meeting attendees on the drivers, issues and available guidance for public sector SOA adoption and management. The podcast starts with brief opening statements from Victor, Bill and Kshemendra, followed by a facilitated Q&A with the audience.

For the most part, my facilitation consisted of passing the microphone around. However, I did get one question in, after observing the numerous similarities between public and private sector SOA. No surprise, I found the biggest difference to be the predisposition for governance in the public sector. On that theme, I asked the panelists "how do you balance governance with productivity, actually being able to get something done and out the door".

In his response, Kshemedra Paul spoke to correlating the size, scope, complexity and impact of the problem domain with the governance structure:

"If you are trying to solve a big societal problem, then these formalities and these structures are important, because there are so many stakeholders, there are so many different levels and so many issues. There are the technical issues, but also in many cases privacy/civil liberty-type issues, or security and protection, personally liable information, I mean, so many different considerations that come into play. And there are plenty of examples where somebody skipped a step or did not do the full due diligence, and it later on kind of came back and torpedoed the program. And forget about the waste of money, and time and effort, you are still not filling that societal need, right. So these structures, they have grown up through a need to have this level of control. And another thing I would add is that sometimes they can be your friend, right? If you can work within those processes, right, and then when things get to be mature like service-oriented architecture, we are able to inject them in the appropriate way through the governance processes and the establishment’s practices, then it becomes easier to get the broad-based adoption, because it is familiar to people"

Bill Vass shared an interesting governance tactic from his CIO days, in respect to managing a systems integrator relationship:

"I put the requirement in their contracts that if they did not follow those things [architecture and programming standards], I did not have to pay them, they would do the work for free. And that tends to herd them in the right direction. Another thing that we did is incentives for re-use...most systems integrators are going to be incentivized not to re-use... because they are time and material, to build everything from scratch that they can for each individual chance, and sell the same thing over and over again. So what we did is we built into our contracts that if a service was created that could be re-used, and it gets re-used, then they get a bonus. And then if they re-use a service, they get a bonus. So they make more money if they re-use existing things. And this changed the behavior within the governance model where they went out and looked in the universal business registry for a get-order status before they wrote it, because they got paid more if they re-used one, because they would have less labor and greater profit. And if they created the get-order status routine, they would generalize it enough so others could use it, so they would make profit off of that. And this herded the cats towards an integrated architecture over time without – again, people are always the problem. It is not the technology. So I would love to see the government look at that kind of incentivized capability inside their contracts."

Later in the roundtable, the topic of skills came up. In his response, Bill provided one of my (new) all time favorite quotes from a provider of products. Emphasis is mine:

"It is finding people who can abstract, even people who can build an architecture without putting a product name in it is extremely hard. It is not an architecture if it has a product name in it. I spent a long time explaining that, because architecture lives beyond that, right, and I think that is a challenge across the board."

To listen to the full podcast (54 min) and/or read the transcript, go here.

Next up, we'll be releasing the podcasts from day 2 of the March meeting, which was focused on Centers of Excellence.